The row is locked in advance once one of its attribute is changed. If anyone else attempts to acquire a lock of the same row during this process, he will be forced to wait until the first transaction has completed. This is achieved by using the familiar SELECT…FOR UPDATE syntax. This is the safest locking mode because two transactions will never make inconsistent change to the same row. However, this locking mode has disadvantages such that:

If a user selects a record for update, and then leaves for lunch without finishing or aborting the transaction. All other users that need to update that record are forced to wait until the user returns and completes the transaction, or until the DBA kills the offending transaction and releases the lock.

The Deadlock – Users A and B are both updating the database at the same time. User A locks a record and then attempt to acquire a lock held by user B – who is waiting to obtain a lock held by user A.

Optimistic locking:

Optimistic Locking is a strategy where you read a record, take note of a version number and check that the version hasn’t changed before you write the record back. When you write the record back you filter the update on the version to make sure it’s atomic. (i.e. hasn’t been updated between when you check the version and write the record to the disk) and update the version in one hit.

If the record is dirty (i.e. different version to yours) you abort the transaction and the user can re-start it.

This strategy is most applicable to high-volume systems and three-tier architectures where you do not necessarily maintain a connection to the database for your session. In this situation the client cannot actually maintain database locks as the connections are taken from a pool and you may not be using the same connection from one access to the next.